From the West Bank to US campuses, Iran's psychological influence is spreading - interview

The Islamic Republic goes to great lengths to invest in influencing minds across the globe to act against Israel and the US. The Jerusalem Post recently spoke with Aviram Bellaishe, vice president at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, to hear more about these efforts.

Bellaishe manages the center’s relationships with Arab countries – countries with which Israel has agreements and countries with which it does not, he said – and researches the worlds of psychological warfare and media.

What does it mean to research psychological warfare?

For instance, I would ask not how the elimination of chief of Hamas’s militia Mohammed Deif affects the battlefield in military terms, but how it impacts the other side in terms of their psyche. The question is how does his assassination affect the population and Hamas? An “icon with seven souls” was eliminated by Israel. What does it say about the perception of Israeli intelligence and deterrence, cracks within Hamas? Would such an event cause others, who are possibly less psychopathic than Sinwar, to stop and enter into negotiations?

I also carry out analyses of statements made by the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Ali Khamenei. I believe he sees himself as a sort of guide for the minds. He puts much effort into crafting narratives against Israel, even tying his struggle for Palestinians to attempts to affect universities in the US. He mentioned explicitly that influencing through means of communication is key to victory in conflicts, more than a missile or a fighter plane. He also said that whoever influences minds and hearts and controls the means of communication will succeed, for which he gives credit to journalists and intellectuals.

This is true also of the US campuses. We investigated his psychological statements, managed to identify them, and found that he built a narrative of social and conscientious jihad, supporting the campus demonstrations and planting the idea that, if it weren’t for the Islamic Republic, the Palestinian cause would have died out a long time ago, which is why Iran gains sympathy. And later on we saw how this hatred is directed to act against the US from within.

The Islamic Republic is very astute when it comes to creating narratives which would then become reality. As early as 10 days after October 7, Khamenei already spoke in terms of “genocide” and “bringing Israel to justice.”

Many times, if you analyze Khamenei’s statements, you find out where he is going next. When he said on Oct. 7 that Israel’s “most vital arteries” should be stopped, not much later the Houthis attacked for the first time. When he talked about Muslim countries that should end relations with Israel, Erdogan issued a statement halting trade with Israel. The same goes for universities in the US. What he says should be taken seriously. Unlike others, he distinguishes between arrogance and bragging, and things that are actually happening on the ground.

What are the Iranian influence attempts we see in the West Bank?

We’ve seen their influence there as early as 2014. They have an orderly array of influence at their disposal, which includes social media, news networks. The higher ranks in the regime recite the same message in a very orderly manner. They also control who tweets what.

In 2014, in dozens of statements that percolated from Khamenei himself to his officials to media networks and then to Palestinians themselves, they talk about how their main task is to arm the West Bank.

The Iranians managed to build a narrative for the Western world in which innocent Palestinian children from the West Bank still fight with stones against the occupying army’s tanks, as if it were 40 years ago, and it works: a BBC reporter told former prime minister [Naftali] Bennett that “Israeli soldiers like to kill children.”

To this I say that the Israeli narrative should also change in accordance and stress the terrorist infrastructures of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which trained, financed, and armed terrorists in the West Bank, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas.

The Iranians aim to turn Judea and Samaria into a new Gaza and create a new front against Israel. We saw this in the Iranian attempts to act in Jordan, because in their eyes it is clear that the axis of smuggling arms and arming the West Bank must pass through the Hashemite Kingdom.

We have a website called 7.10 that attacks Iranian or Arab disinformation and tries to show in Arabic and Persian a refutation of lies.

There was a video of Iranian operatives showing their route from Iran to Iraq and then Jordan, claiming that they are ready for war with Israel. The psychological message aside, there is a statement here not only towards Israel but also towards Jordan. Both through the media and through their actions, they are trying to close in on Israel from all directions.

Since 2014, the Islamic Republic didn’t just talk about Jenin, they also talked about the “Arabs of ’48,” a nickname for Israeli Arabs. It’s clear that what they want is to arm Judea and Samaria, Jenin, and from northern Samaria they also aim to reach the Arabs citizens of Israel, to “tighten the rope” on the neck of who they consider to be the “lesser devil.”

Hamas and PIJ are both financed by Iran and both are attempting to gain ground in Judea and Samaria. We saw this in the investigations of Gazan militants, in which a PIJ operative from Gaza told about the training he received in Iran. You see Iran’s statements about creating capabilities: rockets, tunnels, like in Gaza. This is its directive, and we saw direct involvement of Qasem Soleimani himself in this story.

Here Israel must also invest in the area of consciousness. When the Iranians talk about turning Judea and Samaria into Gaza in terms of the armed military capability, we must stress in return that it also means turning the West Bank into how Gaza looks like today, warn those trying to build Gaza-like capabilities in the West Bank that it means the West Bank will end up looking like Gaza.

By the way, the Palestinian struggle is of no interest to the Islamic Republic. It is a tool for twofold confrontation – militarily, to activate the militias and organizations such as Hamas and PIJ against Israel under the pretext of an Islamic struggle, and also psychologically.

By supporting the Palestinian struggle, the Iranian regime takes under its wings the American protesters who support the Palestinian struggle, and influence them to turn them into agents, with the fusion to the progressives, against the US itself. Following the use [by Iranian-inspired protesters] of terms such as “genocide,” “colonialism,” and “racism” against Israel, everything is directed back at the US, the “Great Satan.”

What should Israel do in the field of overt and covert psychological impact?

I keep asking myself this all the time. As far as I know, after Oct. 7 there were a lot of civil efforts in the field of psychological impact. It is wrong to call it “hasbara.” “Hasbara” means “to explain an existing event.” Influence and consciousness mean something different, a preliminary and preparatory event, and it should be carried out ahead of time and not as a result of what has already happened. We saw how Hamas had propaganda videos following October 7 which were already made and ready. Khamenei, too, praised Hamas leaders for their “psychological struggle.”

We need in Israel a national psychological warfare array that will work openly. Additionally, we need a body that coordinates messages. For instance, what do you want to convey about Deif? How much money did Iran invest in Hamas and PIJ? How do the Iranian people, who are in tremendous financial distress, respond to the fact that instead of taking care of water shortages, education, and municipal services, the regime invests in its proxies? Formulating these messages in a coordinated way is of utmost importance.

As for the covert part, there is a lot to do in terms of media influence and our relationships with Israel supporters who do not want to make themselves visible but will be happy to assist. If we analyze the narrative correctly, we can see that there is a common enemy for many around this region: first the Islamic Republic, and then the Muslim Brotherhood and Sunni extremism. Israel is the only democracy that sits at the intersection between the efforts of the Iranian Shi’ites and their proxies, and the Muslim Brotherhood axis, such as Hamas and others. We have to convey the fact that Israel is not the problem but the solution to fending off these two. Not presenting it in this way will mean missing the mark.

Right now there is no central body that tries to coordinate Israel’s messages to the Jewish communities, to media in different languages – English, Arabic, Persian, etc. Unfortunately, in the world of civic consciousness, to the best of my knowledge, there is still no such comprehensive national body that coordinates the tasks and messages. I don’t know of a thought process that works to change the narrative with legal, technological, and cognitive tools.

Israel is a technological powerhouse; we are world champions in technological tools. If only there were a national consciousness array, we would achieve many things. TikTok is an example of the influence on the young minds. The unbelievable gap between anti-Israel and pro-Israel statements is mind-boggling. At some point they were talking about a one-to-seven ratio.

Maybe it’s just because we’re outnumbered, as usual?

In the world of consciousness, this is exactly the point. You are able to appear a large number of times, and this is unrelated to the quantity but to your quality and your human resources. This is something that is unfortunately not done enough here.

Look at our efforts, for example. We are a small nonprofit organization, and we started our project on October 7, a few days after the war. I was looking for volunteers for an awareness campaign, and 120 volunteers contacted me. When I came to the JCPA president and told him I started a page named October 7 in my living room, he called us and invited us do it in the office.

Again, we are a tiny body, and, still, our page quickly reached 20,000 organic followers, with four million exposures to our material. It was all about simplifying and facilitating information to the public. We took the Hamas charter and simplified it for the public, as well as short comments from our experts. These are videos that even a young child can watch because they are animated, relating to crimes committed by Hamas, false statements from Khamenei, and more.

And this is just a tiny organization! Volunteers [working] of their own accord. There are many who did the same from their living room. This is the beauty of Israel, and if this power would only became coordinated, budgeted, and planned – we will no longer feel that we are few against the many. We would make sure to target those who were important to us. We could strengthen the Jewish base, make the information they need accessible while they struggle hour by hour, every day, in the street and look for the right arguments.

We could bring the Middle East to Europe through partners. We have partners who are first-class intellectuals and journalists in the Arab world and [who] explain, together with us, about the dangers of the radicalism of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, which are capable of raping and slaughtering, and what the Iranian threat is.

When you stand alongside first-class commentators from the Arab world, there is a true authenticity to it. They are not bots but trusted and intellectual personalities who say it in their own words. Arab partners who say that Israel is not the problem, and Hamas is only a representative. [It’s] radical Islam that burns and rapes, and this is not the characteristic of Islam.

We must refuse this frame of “Israel against the world” and flip it backwards to a worldwide struggle against Iran’s influence. For them Israel is the smaller fish. The larger part of their plan is to undermine the foundations of the regimes in the US and Jordan. Iran takes over country after country, strangles it economically, like what happened in Iraq and South Africa. They indoctrinate the people and establish terrorist organizations like Hezbollah, which the Lebanese themselves, even if they oppose it, can do nothing about.

Iran works with an economic rationale. They seek to generate economic pressure against Israel, either through the Houthis or by cyberattacks against Israeli firms and companies.

So the answer would have to be economic pressure on Iran, such as on oil sales, and the US is unfortunately not doing enough on the issue.

But in my opinion, all of the above is just a diversionary tactic until they can reach the holy grail, which is a nuclear bomb. Then everything will change.

We can see how Iran shows restraint on problems on their own borders with the Taliban, Pakistan, Kuwait, Azerbaijan. They are putting everything aside and playing a long-term game of chess. They are waiting to acquire their nuclear weapon and return to the game in all their glory – and this is the message we have to convey. •